How often do you actually use the keypad, and is it worth the annoyance of having the entire keyboard shifted to the left? You can also forget about anything with a 13- or 14-inch screen if you insist on a built-in keypad.

For the few occasions where I might need to enter lots of numeric data, there are USB keypads.

To be fair the machines with soldered on RAM are often that way because they already have the maximum that the chipset supports.

The thinnest notebooks out there use soldered-on RAM more than likely because sockets would make them thicker. It's not just Apple that's following this approach, either; I have a Dell Latitude 7370 that's fixed at 8 GB RAM. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair number of other "ultrabook" models took the same approach.

(Apparently the entire bottom panel is still removable with some screws, and the SSD is an M.2 (?) unit that can be replaced with something of larger capacity. Nobody's figured out a sufficiently low-profile method for accomodating RAM upgrades, though.)

The point on a mobile device is pretty dubious, actually. Who in the world would like to watch a move on the tiny little screen?

When it's hanging off the seat in front of you, the average cellphone or tablet screen is big enough. Pop it into an Airhook and it'll just about be at eyeball height. I caught up on a couple of shows that way flying home this past weekend.

Where do you live and for what are you shopping that the average new car costs $33k? The midsize crossover I'm driving now was $27k four years ago, and I think the only options it doesn't have are AWD and leather (and it doesn't have those because we didn't want them). That's the most I've ever spent on a car, and my wife and I were making about $120k-ish between us at the time.

nobody wants to supervise someone with more experience than they have.

My sister's first job out of college was at a public university in the southwest where she hoped to pick up her master's while she worked. Her boss didn't have a degree, and set out to make her life miserable. Skip forward just a few months...mission accomplished.:-P

It's weird. I remember when a sitting president was sued for sexual assault, and at the time Democrats didn't seem to find the allegations credible. Nor the rape allegations. Well, I'm sure they had their reasons beyond just, you know, rank hypocrisy.

If Democrats didn't have double standards, they'd have no standards at all.:-P

But with all that Trump has said or promoted, I've not seen yet where he came out to promote the agenda that is against equality in matters of gender and race.

You haven't seen him say it because he hasn't said it. The extreme-left noise machine has thrown out all of these...um...trumped-up charges, and their stenographers in the "mainstream" media have reliably parroted it far and wide.

Woot recently had the Latitude 7370 available, starting under $600 for a refurb. Near as I can tell, it's the same basic design as the XPS 13, but with Win10 Pro instead of Home and some more business-oriented features. (On closer examination, it also looks like it has a second Thunderbolt port instead of a second USB port.) I've not gotten around to installing Linux on it yet, but once secure boot was switched off, it ran SystemRescueCD and the latest Gentoo LiveDVD from a USB stick without any issues. Nice little machine. It's small enough that you can use it on a plane even if you're not in first class or an exit row...most other notebooks are so large that either the screen will be at an uncomfortable viewing angle or the front edge will be poking you in the chest.
Already took a look at the manual. Except for RAM (soldered on), everything's upgradable once you unscrew the bottom cover. Mine has a 128GB M.2 SSD; if anything's a candidate for an upgrade, that is, especially if I'm going to have it dual-boot.

They mean Open as in the 1980s-1990s version of "Open" like Common Open Software Environment or the Open Software Foundation. None of these have anything to do with Free Software(as in you get the source), but with open specifications. In that sense, Microsoft does have an "Open" platform, most of their protocol specs are available even if they are bastardized versions of standard protocols, same with most of their APIs, they tend to be fairly well documented.